COVID inevitability a ‘defeatist argument’

There needs to be a ‘more sustainable way’ of managing the pandemic, top doctor argues

As the province continues trudging through the latest wave of COVID-19, Niagara’s acting medical officer of health says there needs to be a “more sustainable way” of managing the pandemic.

“We’re not going to prevent every infection, we’re not going to prevent every case of long COVID, but there’s probably more things we can do which are sustainable, which don’t disrupt our lives, where we could actually prevent some of this suffering going on,” said Dr. Mustafa Hirji.

And the idea of inevitability, of every person eventually getting the virus, is a “defeatist argument.”

“We’re had lots of infections in our past which were infections that everybody suffered from. Malaria used to be endemic in this part of Ontario, nobody gets malaria anymore. People used to get gastrointestinal infections all the time … that doesn’t happen anymore. We’ve prevented those from happening,” he said.

“We should be thinking about this infection the same way we’ve thought about infections, that there was ways to sustainably prevent it and make our society healthier overall.”

Hirji said there’s a number of things people can do, which have not been done, that would help ensure every person lives their best and healthiest life.

That includes upgrading ventilation and filtration systems to clean indoor air, rearranging the calendar around holidays to reduce spikes of infection and addressing some of the inequities from the impact of the virus.

“We should be trying to make our society as healthy as we reasonably can,” he said.

Vaccinations and masking remain the top two measures available to help protect one another and control the spread of the virus.

Hirji said he is continuing to ask the Ministry of Health to reinstitute mask mandates “at least for a short period of time while we continue to see really high infections,” rather than doing it regionally, because a decision for the entire province will have the greatest impact and best adherence.

However, if he starts to see levels of hospitalizations increase to the point where Niagara hospitals are stretched thin, or an increase in the more severe impacts of the virus, Hirji said, “that would perhaps be a reason to take the action of doing a local requirement here, recognizing it wouldn’t be as impactful as it might be otherwise.”

With Ontario’s chief medical officer of health extending the provincewide Section 22 order, with mandatory masking remaining in public transit, health-care settings, congregate care settings and longterm-care and retirement homes, Hirji said Dr. Kieran Moore opened the door “to actually taking that kind of action.”

“Our focus really wants to be to try to convince him to broaden that action during the rest of this wave, and make sure he’s able to act in perhaps a future wave if we don’t see the political side of government acting again.”

Niagara Health Wednesday afternoon reported no new deaths of patients with COVID-19.Four patients were being treated in intensive care units. Ninety-one patients with the virus remained in hospital, with 19 being treated primarily for COVID-19.

Outbreaks have been declared at four of the hospital system’s sites, including three in Niagara Falls, one in St. Catharines, three in Welland and one in Port Colborne.

There were 139 hospital workers and physicians at Niagara Health self-isolating Wednesday.

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We should be trying to make our society as healthy as we reasonably can.

DR. MUSTAFA HIRJI

ACTING MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH